Testify VS go-cmp

Testify simplifies writing unit tests in Go. The standard testing package is fine, but Testify adds assertions, mocking, and suite support, making tests more readable and maintainable.

I prefer to use the Go library testify, which significantly simplifies the code:

nil is returned initially, as we're creating user_test.go and using Testify to create tests as we shape the behavior of PostUser. We don't have a DB wired up yet, so the responses will simply be hard-coded structs of what we expect the API to respond with for now to pass the tests.

Bonus: Testify

Testify: Popular framework with assertion functions and mock objects.

Testing: unit and integration tests using Testify and formatted test output using gotestsum

We’ve integrated the excellent testify library with its “assert” functionality to allow for smoother test implementation:

This article is too basic and does not introduce anything you'd encounter in a typical Go project. If you want introduction to Go testing I recommend just reading the official docs https://pkg.go.dev/testing and understanding how to write table driven tests - https://go.dev/wiki/TableDrivenTests.

Going beyond what's built in, get familiar with https://github.com/stretchr/testify as that's used a lot.

Of course, as soon as people saw this, the third-party assertion helper libraries started appearing. The most popular one seems to be testify (although I've never used it). Personally, I thought that the explicit check would be good enough for me, but it's true that after writing a bunch of tests, the boilerplate does seem unnecessarily verbose.

github.com/stretchr/testify

This made me think of a couple other interesting things:

1. you can change which algorithm is used in git diff as multiple are supported

https://luppeng.wordpress.com/2020/10/10/when-to-use-each-of...

2. Google has an edit graph implementation in Go in the cmp package

https://github.com/google/go-cmp/blob/master/cmp/internal/di...

Assertion libraries that people seem to love: - testify (my favorite) - go-cmp is a more barebones library - gotest.tools -- I have never used this but some swear by it

it uses https://github.com/google/go-cmp instead of reflect.DeepEqual

When I use functional arguments, I either prefix all of the options with the same prefix or put them in a dedicated package (like cmpopts) to help the IDE.

Checking for equality in tests: https://github.com/google/go-cmp

oklog/ulid to generate IDs. coreos/go-oidc for validating JWTs I get from auth. google/go-cmp for comparing structs in tests (unless the project is already using Testify). spf13/pflag because life's too short for Go's flag handling. getkin/kin-openapi for validating reqests/responses against my OpenAPI spec (in tests).

One thing to keep in mind about reflect.DeepEqual is because of the way it is implemented you could get positive results when the values are not actually the same, see this comment for reference.